Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 20, 2011 @08:37AM
from the trees-everywhere-celebrate dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNN:
"As further proof of how digital media dominate today's entertainment, Amazon announced Thursday that its customers now buy more e-books for its Kindle device than all print books — hardcover and paperback — combined. Given that people seem to spend more and more of their time peering at glowing electronic screens, this was probably bound to happen. Still, the swiftness of this sea change — three-and-a-half years after the Kindle hit the market — appeared to catch even Amazon by surprise. 'Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,' said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in a statement."

I bought a Kindle but now I find myself exclusively buying used paper because it's waaayy cheaper (many books below $1, some $.01) and I can take the used book to the bookstore and get turn-in value which I can use to buy more books.

I bought a Kindle but now I find myself exclusively buying used paper because it's waaayy cheaper (many books below $1, some $.01) and I can take the used book to the bookstore and get turn-in value which I can use to buy more books.

I've been going to the library less-often because of this. £0.01 + £1.80 (or whatever it is) postage is worth the convenience (my local library is in the same building as my local supermarket, but I'm not often in the mood for browsing books when I'm about to buy vegetables).

Also, I tend to take several months to read a book. I'm currently part-way through five books. I will donate them to charity when I'm done with them.

I used to do that but I kept mixing up the content. For example, after reading all the books the concepts and information would mix together so I would think I learned about the "Quantum mating habits of hedge fund computers in C++" - I only read one book at a time now.

Yes exactly. As a result the number of pirated books has got to be skyrocketing. This is even worse than for music since books are so small it makes sense to download collections vs single books. Once I found eBooks costing more than paper I stopped buying them electronically. The fact that publishers actually tried to whine that printing presses cost lots of money as reason for high ELECTRONIC pricing just pissed me off to say the least. MacMillen's blog was a pretty amazing read, these people are so arrog

And I'm sure that there are Internet hoarders out there that have managed to download 50GB of eBooks even though they don't read. You still have to buy a printing press if you want to sell a single paper book. The reality is, though, that authors will start bypassing publishers altogether, and will start to make a decent living from selling books really cheap.

People only can read so much, at some point lower prices can't be replaced by more sales

Yeah, but I get the feeling that that point is a far cry lower than max(book.edition(hardback).price + 2, book.edition(paperback).price * 5)...

If someone were to bring out some back catalogs of GOOD stuff at $1-$2 a pop, I'd happily blow through my paycheck. The books you find on the torrent sites, unlike most media where the file traders deliver a BETTER product, usually suck ass. If it's not something that was actually put out as an ebook, it's usually some horribly OCRed mess, assuming they even bother

I like the Kindle a lot but indeed, e-books for the Kindle are way too expensive. I once bought an e-book from Amazon for 2 US$ more than the paper version, and found out that the figures were left out! There is absolutely no excuse for that. Never again will I buy an e-book from Amazon.

Competition was going to come out of somewhere, one way or another. Had it not been iBooks, it would had been the Nook. But competition exists at many levels, and even if publishers lock their titles and no one else competes with those specific titles, authors are more and more deciding to just skip the publisher all-together and go directly to Amazon, resulting in cheaper eBooks that give the original author more money and a reason to write

Since I moved house, there are two charity shops within about 2 minutes walk that sell books for under 50p each. At this price, they're impulse purchases, and at least one of them usually has something that looks interesting (often they have sets of things, so I can pick up half a dozen books by the same author and have a couple of weeks worth of reading material). It's a fairly limited selection, but I find I prefer that (see 'the paradox of choice'), because filtering something the size of Amazon's range for things I might want to read is a huge task, and their recommendations are useless.

I use project gutenberg for classics once I found out the free classics at some other places were edited/abridged for some unknown reason.

Also, you can wrangle a free Amazon Prime membership (free two-day shipping on purchases) by doing stuff like signing up (free) for at amazon.com/mom which is for expecting parents. Amazon gives you a free 6 month Prime membership to load up with.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [gutenberg.org] is a god-send. Thousands of books to choose from, all free. If you like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or any other old-time author, you never have to pay for these books.

Consumers wanting to read books electronically can now choose from many competing devices, including Sony's Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and a variety of touchscreen tablets, including Apple's iPad.

They make it sound so easy and effortless! But they fail to address the matrix [wikipedia.org] of which service and format is support/authorized for which device. You can blame it on DRM or competitor lockout greed or whatever but it's still a major inhibitor in my mind.

Not only that, but it is multi-platform. I have used both the OSX and Windows versions extensively and both are very nice. I doubt the Linux version is any different than these two.

It is a great app, the developer is very active (some say to a fault) and he doesn't blast you with donation begging screens every other click. It is also very simple to use, of the half-dozen Kindle users I know that also use Calibre none yet has complained about it.

Please explain to a clueless user just what it is that I'm losing. The books appear to work equally well in ePub or Mobipocket, regardless of which was the original format. As for the back end, why would that matter to the end user? Genuinely curious.

That reminds me of a friend who ripped all his CDs to mp3. Then he got the apple bug and converted everything to mp4 or whatever. Then someone told him ogg was better so he converted again. Then he didn't like the sound quality so he converted them back to mp3, wondering why it sounded even worse.

Firsthand experience with calibre (which I still use, but it's not perfect).

If the source file is PDF, there are some bugs in the converter that will make you lose some combinations of letters (most obvious and common I've seen is the "ll" combination. Something to do with ligatures or something). Despite forum threads from last year saying the new engine was supposed to fix this, a month ago with the latest version (as of then) it was still happening.

If the recent rumours [goodereader.com] turn out to be accurate, that matrix is simplified considerably, as epub would become the single most-supported "modern" format. Amazon's recently partnered with OverDrive, who do library e-book lending. OverDrive deals in audiobooks (mp3, wma) and ebooks (epub and pdf). It seems unlikely to me that Amazon would enter into an agreement with an entity that carries next to nothing that is readable on the Kindle.

Sure, they can provide them in a Kindle-compatible format, but libraries would still have to buy them, just like every other book. All I'm saying is that it makes sense for Amazon to support ePub, especially in light of the partership with OverDrive, who *already* use it. That way Kindle owners could actually use the existing OverDrive titles rather than having to wait for the library to purchase them in a Kindle-compatible format, if they ever do.

I just made a decision on what format I was happiest with, and the rest came from there. Having decided that ePub would be best for books and PDF for magazines/other stuff, I also chose to specify that both must be unencrypted and looked for a store that sold them in the UK and a device that would read both.

WHSmith sells ePub books, but they're encrypted: so I buy them there and decrypt them myself, and keep them backed up on my PC and online. I went with the Sony Reader PRS-350 as the reader, and have been

Same thing happened for me. I wanted something that read ePub books well and the PRS-350 fits that. It works quite well with calibre.

It's funny about the DRM though. I haven't put a DRM'd book on it ever, but I've purchased more books for it than I have for the last few years of physical books. You don't need piracy when it's easy. You just have to make sure you crack the encryption so you can always read it in the future (or at least until ePub files stop working, instead of when the authentication servers

Just stick to a store that does pdf books and you are fine. I prefer epub which everything in that matrix supports except Kindle. Any other format does seem that you need to match your device to it as you mentioned. However, I am probably biased. I have an Android-powered tablet, Android phone, run Windows and Linux, and a Nook and have no problems with portability with my ebooks.

Are they counting in free books on this? Roughly 70% of all my Kindle books are free books. Classics that I'm too cheap to pick up for $5 from Borders... And out of the other 30% about half of those were just a few dollars or less.

Are they counting in free books on this? Roughly 70% of all my Kindle books are free books. Classics that I'm too cheap to pick up for $5 from Borders... And out of the other 30% about half of those were just a few dollars or less.

Exactly it said more units were sold not more dollars.. Cheap books are being sold for cheap or free to pump up the numbers. Additionally the "sales" figures are for amazon not the book market as a whole. You buy kindle books from Amazon so it focuses the demand and is not representative.

Also I wonder if they are including "new" books or "used" books in that comparison. The used book market is not insignificant but there are no used kindle books.

I was assuming that even though the units "sold" outnumber the paper books, the numbers are skewed because people who download eBooks are probably downloading more than they actually read. I guess it matters little to Amazon, however; a sale is still a sale.

That said, I'm honestly surprised that audio books haven't become a dominant force in this market.

When it comes to reading, I read plenty, it's just that it's very rarely for entertainment. If the time comes where I'd like to "read a book", I much pref

At some point, the supply of books in Gutenberg will stop increasing. Every 20 years, the United States Congress enacts a 20-year extension to the term of copyright. The Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect in 1978, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act went into effect in 1998. So once all notable books in the English language published between 1600 and 1922 are in Gutenberg, where should Gutenberg go from there? You might claim that there are enough pre-1923 books that a human, and for this re

Downloading post-1923 works from PG Australia or PG Canada in the United States is copyright infringement, as far as I can tell. Or were you referring to emigration from the United States to Australia?

Amazon is currently only selling books that were published in $current_year or before, where $current_year increases. Project Gutenberg, on the other hand, is fixed at 1922 due to the effects of successive copyright term extensions. Digitaldc appeares to claim (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that a book published before 1923 can always substitute for a book published between 1923 and $current_year.

I think I'm really afraid for what the ebook revolution is going to mean for readers like me. Nevermind the ownership of digital media (and what that really means these days).

My problem is what less printed material means for libraries, which is where I get almost all my print and audiobooks these days.
Sure, they have Overdrive for electronic checkout of e-media. But the selection my library currently offers stinks, and the number of copies is limited!

I hope in 10 years I can still get a nice fantasy romance to enjoy, or take my daughter for a readalong...

I have a hard time believing POD will continue to be viable if the content purveyors have their way with pricing. Plus, what's the output like? Some books just need to be/books/ either because they're special reads or children's picture books, or for some other reason.

I like the idea of just-in-time production for physical things, but I think this isn't the best place for it. At least, not for someone like me who sees a book as more than a collection of data...

Have to sacrifice some karma here, but are you even aware that paper books are much worse? eBooks:

A) Saving environment, no paper waste etc.
B) Sparing trees and woods in general
C) Eliminating those water polluting paper mills
D) No storage problems, flexible, downloadable..
E) eBooks are the only way for the future, paper books are so last millenium, modern people enjoy new media and consumption driven society shoud support current media/artist/developers not some antique book business or libraries.

They *are* facing cuts, as is pretty much every other city entity here. Our library system is 20 branches strong, with phenomenal service and a good selection in physical media (books, mags, DVDs, etc.). To make up some of their shortfalls, the library has book sales, fundraisers, awareness campaigns and so on.

What scares me is what happens when the majority of new works have both formats, and the publishers or distributors are pushing e-media rather than physical. Will the costs to acquire a good coll

I hate it when I find that I have to order the print edition and wait a month for it to arrive because the Kindle version is region blocked. (OTOH I wouldn't but any Kindle books if I couldn't strip the DRM off and convert them to EPUB because I don't own a Kindle.)

They do region block paper editions, or at least try. There's efforts by the publishers to make it illegal to import books from other countries if the publisher hasn't released them in your country yet. The "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series is a great example of this. If you wanted to be ahead of the curve, you got a friend to bring back "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" when they were in England, before it was available in the States.

Similar yet different issue with Janet Evanovitch novels, the Stephanie Plum series. Even more stupid: I can buy the first, second and third book, 12th too, from France but, god forbids, not the fourth, fifth and so on up to 11.
Region lock crazyness in all its splendor.

Could Amazon, by making the statement that e-books are selling better than paper books, be using marketing dishonesty to promote e-books?

Or, is Amazon's statement an indication that Amazon is no longer the preferred place to buy paper books? Since Amazon started, there have been many, many other bookstores that have started to sell online.

A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant.

In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.

no, i see A LOT of kindles on the NYC subway. at least as much as paper book readers if not more. then there is my ipad 2 and other tablets. i can carry thousands of books on my ipad 2 and they won't clutter up my apartment either. in fact i'm going to try to start getting rid of some of my paper books because there are ipad versions of the media. in the case of cookbooks there are whole apps with video and detailed instructions that are easier to use than a book

OK, so this is anecdotal, and we all know the plural of anecdote is not data...

I buy lots of books, and I can barely remember the last time I bought a book from a source other than Amazon. Even the used books I buy I get through Amazon's marketplace. About 2 months ago I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. I bought it to use on my commute, with the idea that I'd finally get around to reading all the classics (which are free), but would rather buy paper books for anything else.

Libraries should start up a bitcoin like system of digital files, whereby the can still loan the file and it would be out of their possession. Then legally, they can argue they are not breaking copyright, because they are not copying files but transferring them, just like a physical book/movie/what_have_you.

Ideally, US law should get into consumer rights now, and any commercially copyrighted content from movies to books to music dealt with in this fashion so that digital consumers can donate their used boo

Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.

Q: How the hell do they justify that???A: But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me

If the convenience was worth less to you than the price difference, you'd buy the paper version.

> publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???)

First, consider maybe they're not charging a premium, but book sellers are trying to shift very old stock at a loss, in an attempt to recoup any of their investment.

Secondly, in the UK e-books attract sales tax (VAT), which paper books do not; this is a lot of what pushes UK e-book prices over paper editions, but it does depend on whether you're including that in the cost.

Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.

Same here.

So for me at least, buying paper books is now a last resort.

The only print books I consider buying are professional books I need for work and can't get on the Kindle.

What I really find amazing is the Slashdot vitriol on e-books. I really get the impression that is all just a bunch of young people who:-- don't own loads of books;-- who never had to move said loads of books to another house/flat;-- who never thought out the costs of having all that paper stored in a shelve.-- have eagle eyes and don't care about small & crappy fonts

Honestly, all I took away from your post is that you don't like e-books. That's perfectly fine, of course; I prefer the tactile sensation of a real book myself, and I certainly understand and agree with your point about old books and preserving history.

But honestly, none of that is keeping me from getting a Kindle and buying e-books. My issue is the price. I am getting less rights to my property (or should I say licensed acquistion), have to pay a $100+ premium in terms of buying a Kindle to begin with

In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.

...and those things are delicate, difficult (and dangerous to the material) to copy, and only available to people local to the "old books room", presuming some scholar hasn't carried said book off to a climate controlled archive somewhere, probably never to be seen again outside a formal academic environment. Even books pr

A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant.

OK, my wife and I own a lot of books, and I only have a few electronic versions but not e-books per se, they're PDF. As far as I know, paper does NOT last forever. Now it can last a long time of course, but it's definitley not permanent. (does this even need to be stated?) In fact, the electronic versions of books I do have (Truck/motorcycle repair manuals, etc) I got because I can have backup versions, and print out pages I need when in the garage. I think this story is more about e-book formats... bu

And ideally, people would be able to read copies of those books on Kindle or other reader devices just as easily as the Bible and the scripts for Shakespeare's plays. Has Oxford refused to let Gutenberg scan these books?

Are you serious? I had to fly a couple of weeks ago and walking around the gate area I would there were roughly twice as many people reading from an electronic device (mostly Kindles and iPads) as were reading from paper. If I stop at a coffee shop on my way to work, there are always a few people reading from a Kindle. Come to think of it, I haven't seen anybody reading a newspaper at my local coffee shop for quite some time now.

I'm not saying paper is dead, but I do think ebooks are now firmly established

In the DC metro 6 years ago, I felt all alone reading from plucker on my PalmTX on a crowded train... everyone else just read their papers / books while maybe listening to their iPods. 3 years ago, more people were on their Blackberries, in addition to papers / books and the occasional iPhone. Nowadays I haven't been commuting on the metro, but when I do, I occasionally see a few more smartphones and maybe the occasional kindle out. But I kinda expect the DC

I would never want to read from a tablet, but I'm starting to see a pretty high number of e-ink devices popping up around me. (Personally, I am an extremely early adopter of e-ink. Followed the tech from it's first announcement and purchased the first Sony e-Reader that had the technology.) I've always felt that e-ink is the future of e-books and don't really expect tablets to have much staying power for e-book reading as they never caught on despite the availability of similar devices for decades. (Emi

Here in the UK there are lots of people reading Kindles and (to a lesser extent) other e-readers on the Tube in London. It's not uncommon for me to be sat within a seat or two of someone else who also has a Kindle.

Exactly, when it comes to sitting down and relaxing with a book for a few hours, a glowing screen is annoying. I can deal with it at work because I rarely spend more than 30 minutes reading a single document, but anything other than that and it's uncomfortable.

I had over a thousands books in a personal library. Between moving to college, moving out, moving again, they were getting destroyed or left in my basement in totes all around the house where they once were proudly on my personal book shelf. I have some in the garage sitting for about two years now.

Kindle was the first time the medium felt satisfactory. I have a kindle and an iPad to get around the Matrix, but combined I am set for my book needs. No more replacing worn out book

I can't really justify spending $10 to $12 on a novel, especially when it's just going to eat up space at home. So my choices are a) do an inter-library loan which saves me money and clutter and does nothing for the author or b) buy the book for a buck.

I'm talking about the small press stuff here. If we're talking about a mainstream author, it really doesn't feel like my financial contribution matters for squat. I don't feel like I'm supporting a local business going to a McDonalds even if it's owned by a l

I consider that an advantage. The reason I like my ereader is because it isn't backlit, but reflects light. That makes it much easier on my eyes. I program on a backlit laptop all day long, when I'm resting before bed, I don't want to be in that environment. The non-backlit screen is like reading a real book and relaxes my mind before falling asleep. If you need to read in the dark, you can get a $0.99 led booklight or install an ereader on a tablet or smart phone.

I have kobo books and mobipoket installed on my Blackberry Torch and the convenience is amazing. If I'm waiting in line at the post office I can read a few pages of any number of books. I always have my phone but would never carry a seperate ebook reader or paper copy. I don't have the same aversion to a glowing screen as some people have. After all most of us stare at a computer screen all day and don't complain about it.
However, ebooks are still WAY overpriced. As much as the convenience is higher

I resisted for a long time. I read a lot of books and liked the feel of a real one. I can drop it from 2 meters high and just pick it up and find my place again. I did not like the idea of books having DRM and not being able to loan them to a few close friends or trade them in for more at a used book store or donate them to the library. Then there was the whole George Orwell fiasco with Amazon, quite ironic that 1984 was one of the remotely deleted titles.

Convert here too, though slightly different story. I'm a one-device kind of person---I don't want to carry around more than my phone. I found all e-readers unusable, unsatisfying to use. Then iBooks came.

Boy, I fell for that iBooks page turn animation like a sucker. Something about it replicated the feeling of having a real book. I don't think any other ebook reader has the same detailed 3D enhanced page-turn animation.

Seriously though - I dont own an e-reader , Kindle or Otherwise (unless you count my phone) - I really like the idea of an e-reader - But I really dont like the implications this has for the social aspect of books.

I think I speak for a lot of people in this case and for this reason I dont think there will come a day when real books dissappear.

From a techie perspective however - the idea of having a device able to d

What are we going to have instead? Besides, Isnt the searching for something to read a lot different in a bookstore? In a bookstore, you can find books you didnt know you wanted and were not expecting to be interested in. And there is no search or cover-art download delay. Are people going to bookstores and then buying an ebook once they have found the book they want? And are they going to ever offer ebooks at ridiculous sale prices like at a bookstore?And how about the Linux mags with the CD?

Will take a hit due to this in the long run. Your cute convenient PDF/ebook/mobi/bla format of the month wont be around in 1000 years for our successors to read. Hell they may not survive 5 years since they are now copyrighted digital bits to be restricted, modified and deleted by the powers that be on a whim.

Sure they have their place and i have them myself, but if we lose books altogether, we as a society will lose our link to the future and past.

The whole statistic is misleading and self-serving. Amazon WANTS you to get your reading materials delivered electronically because they make the most profit margin when you buy an e-something.

They're leading the world in terms of complete electronic distribution of materials that favor THEM. So, of course they're starting to sell a majority of e-stuff rather than paper equivalents. The number doesn't mean that the rest of the world is doing this.

- grid electricity is gone- tons of hardware that needs it is still lying around; okay some may be damaged or unusable (EMP blast), need to connect to servers, etc. but the majority of it WOULD be fully working (and most data-centers would be mostly intact, if not connected externally, even in the case of nuclear blast).

You're seriously telling me that NOT ONE PERSON knows how to, say, charge a set of AA's without using the national grid? T